Sadly Over-hyped

Excellent, a Must See

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The movie begins with an odd little framing device, wherein a crime reporter questions a morgue attendant and we learn that one Jefferson Monk has been...well, decapitated in a car crash. The entry is actually entitled "The Decapitation of Jefferson Monk", so the film really begins with the ending. The film answers the "How?". So in flashback detectives Jack Packard (Jim Bannon) and Doc Long (Barton Yarborough) talk about how they tried to help wealthy Jefferson Monk (George Macready) just days before when they met in the very restaurant in which they are sitting.Monk tells Doc and Jack that his death has been prophesied to occur in three days. However, the prediction was made a year earlier, shortly after returning from a vacation to the orient with his wife where he felt he had been followed about. Back in San Francisco, Monk's wife was kidnapped by a mysterious oriental cult and the cult leader only agreed to free them both if Jefferson agreed to sell the cult his head upon his death for 10000 dollars. It turns out that the cult worships the one thousand year old preserved body of their deceased leader, who was a dead ringer for Jefferson, and the corpse needs a fresh head as the embalmers' skill had reached their limit. However, this does not mean that the cult will kill Jefferson. Instead, they merely prophesy when he is going to die and will collect the head at that time. To bring home that they might be right, the month before the cult sent Jefferson a prophesy saying his wife would become paralyzed. Three days later she was unable to move her legs and has been wheelchair bound since.Now at first Packard and Long think they are dealing with a nervous rich guy with too active an imagination, but then they witness a freak accident in the restaurant that would have killed Monk had he been sitting at his original table, and there is a one legged man who follows Jefferson home every night with a small satchel - just the size for a man's head, or so Jefferson Monk claims. But then Packard and Long actually see the guy, so maybe there is something to all of this.Now this film is worth watching just for the atmosphere, acting - especially Macready, and the plot twists alone. As for the mystery, the film itself reveals what is going on too early in my opinion. Plus, if you listen to Jefferson Monk recount his story to Packard and Long you are going to see the common thread in the tale long before the mystery is unwound. Why this elaborate ruse? That is for Packard to reveal later in the film.Henry Levin directed all three films in the series and he gives this one some nice noirish touches and a general air of fatalistic doom. It's a good start to the series, and things only get better from there. Nobody in the 40s could make a cheap B mystery film that didn't seem like a cheap B mystery film like Columbia. Recommended.

This woeful film begins with a flimsy, transparent and preposterous plot, followed by wooden performances and action from actors who recite their stilted lines mechanically. George Macready was so outstandingly bad that I'm amazed he wasn't immediately banned from Hollywood forever. Fortunately for all of us he survived to become a pretty good actor. The direction was slow and predictable every step of the way and of course, since this was obviously filmed on pocket change, the entire production showed it. "I Love a Mystery" may have been a popular radio show in its day, and evidently some fans enjoyed this film as well. When TCM offered this, I taped it, hoping for something more in the line of some of the other '40s noir films. Sad.

"I Love a Mystery," based on the radio program of the same name, is a 1945 film starring Jim Bannon, Barton Yarborough, George Macready, and Nina Foch. Packard and Doc Long (Bannon and Yarborough) meet Macready in a nightclub with a woman - apparently he knows when he's going to die. A cult, whose ancient leader Macready resembles, wants his head, I guess to replace it on their leader's mummified body, and one of the members is following him. The detectives agree to follow Macready home to see if they can spot the man, and they do.As preposterous as it sounds (and it is), this is actually a pretty neat mystery, done on New York set at Columbia. There's lots of dry ice and a dark, noirish atmosphere, as well as a few plot twists. It's quite entertaining as well as not being terribly long. And it's a good cast, with the highlights being Macready and Foch as his crippled wife. Growing up, Nina Foch to me was an older woman who did television and quiz shows; later on, I knew she became a big acting teacher in L.A. It's fun to see her as a young woman in films such as this one. It was also fun because I remember Bannon's son from "Lou Grant."

I am a fan of mystery movies, and this is one of my all time favorites. I love the plot twists and the eerie atmosphere. I remember when I first saw this film, many years ago, how astonished I was when the villains are murdered one by one. My only complaint with the film is the phony arrest and jail break of Jack Packard. This was silly and unnecessary. Jack Packard should have been able to nail the killer without these shenanigans. This being said, I recommend this film, especially if you like mysteries and are looking for something different. Jack Packard, played by Jim Bannon, is an excellent screen detective, and Doc Long, played by Barton Yarborough, is a likeable sidekick who provides some comic relief, and best of all is Jefferson Monk played by George Macready.